Walden

Summary

Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters. The long opening chapter, "Economy," argues that most of his neighbors are enslaved by farms, houses and debts they never needed, and that the mass of men live in quiet desperation. Thoreau sets out the true necessaries of life (food, shelter, clothing and fuel), describes building his ten-by-fifteen-foot house with a borrowed axe and boards bought from an Irish railroad worker's shanty, and gives his accounts to the half-penny: the house cost $28.12½, and his food came to about twenty-seven cents a week. "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" states his purpose, to live deliberately and simplify; "Reading" praises the classics read in their own tongues; "Sounds" sets the whistle of the Fitchburg Railroad against the songs of whip-poor-wills and owls; "Solitude" and "Visitors" weigh being alone against company, including a cheerful Canadian woodchopper and simple-minded paupers from the almshouse. In "The Bean-Field" he hoes two and a half acres of beans; in "The Village" he recounts being jailed overnight for refusing to pay a tax. "The Ponds" describes the purity and color of Walden and its neighbors, and "Baker Farm" his meeting with the poor Irish laborer John Field. "Higher Laws" wrestles with hunting, meat-eating, drink and chastity; "Brute Neighbors" stages a mock-epic battle of red and black ants and a game of hide-and-seek with a loon. The winter chapters recall the vanished former inhabitants of the woods, among them the freed slaves Cato Ingraham, Zilpha and Brister Freeman, follow foxes and owls, and record his survey of the frozen pond, which he sounded to a greatest depth of one hundred and two feet, disproving the legend that it was bottomless. "Spring" celebrates the thawing sand bank and the pond's return to life, and the "Conclusion" urges readers to explore their own inner territory and step to the music they hear, ending with the hope that there is more day to dawn. Ticknor and Fields published the book in August 1854. The library's Project Gutenberg text also includes Thoreau's essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (first published in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government"), which argues that a just man must refuse allegiance to a government that upholds slavery and wages an unjust war.

Top Lessons

• Counting the real cost

  Thoreau measures the price of a thing in the amount of life exchanged for it, and he shows his own accounts down to the half-penny to prove that a decent shelter can cost $28.12½. The lesson is not that everyone should live in a cabin but that every possession and every debt should be weighed against the hours of life it consumes.

• Living deliberately

  In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" Thoreau goes to the woods to front the essential facts of life and to find out whether life is mean or sublime. Attention is the virtue he practices most: to the sound of the train, the color of the pond, the battle of the ants.

• Solitude and society

  Thoreau insists he was not lonely at the pond, yet he walked to the village often and kept three chairs for visitors. The book distinguishes chosen solitude, in which a person finds company in nature and thought, from the isolation of a crowd.

• Conscience and the state

  The night in jail mentioned in "The Village" is argued out fully in "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," printed with Walden in the library text. Thoreau holds that a man must not lend his support, even through taxes, to an injustice such as slavery, and must accept the penalty openly.

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Medical Lens

Walden is not a medical book, but it is one of the founding texts of a long tradition that treats nature, solitude and simplified living as remedies for the mind. Its famous diagnosis of quiet desperation, and the claim in "Solitude" that there can be no very black melancholy for one who lives in the midst of Nature with his senses still, are often cited in later writing on nature and mental health; such uses are modern readings, and Thoreau himself frames the matter morally and spiritually rather than clinically. "Economy" is also a study in diet: Thoreau records eating rye and Indian meal bread, rice, potatoes and a little pork and molasses for about twenty-seven cents a week. "Higher Laws" contains his argument for drinking only water, comparing the natural sky with an opium-eater's heaven and treating coffee, tea and wine as forms of intoxication, in the temperance climate of 1840s New England. "Visitors" includes half-witted men from the almshouse, described with more respect than was usual for the period. The "Conclusion" begins by noting that doctors prescribe a change of air and scenery for the sick, and turns the prescription inward. Thoreau's own death from tuberculosis in 1862 is biographical background, not a subject of the book.

• Economy

  The diagnosis of quiet desperation among Concord's laboring men, followed by the inventory of necessaries and Thoreau's food accounts.

• Solitude

  Thoreau argues that nature's society cures melancholy and that a gentle rain is good company for a man alone.

• Visitors

  Simple-minded paupers from the almshouse visit the house, and Thoreau finds one of them more candid than most philosophers.

• Higher Laws

  Thoreau's case for water as the only drink for a wise man, set against wine, coffee, tea and the opium-eater's heaven.

• Conclusion

  The doctors' prescription of a change of air and scenery for the sick becomes a call to explore one's own inner world.